Business to Business (“B2B”) is a term used in electronic commerce to describe the automated communications between trading partners as a part of the business process. In one exemplary exchange of information between a vendor and a business entity, the vendor, who may be one of a number of vendors associated with the business entity, will query one of a number of environment servers—i.e., a server that provides a platform for a particular development environment—for specialized or proprietary information. The vendor may alter or update that information and then return it to the environment servers for storage and later retrieval, retrieval by other vendors, or retrieval and manipulation by the entities controlling the environment servers and the specialized information. Alternately, the transaction may be initiated by one of the environment servers seeking information from the vendor systems.
For example, one of multiple departments within an entity may seek a document or information available from one of various vendors with which the entity has ongoing relationships. To that end, the entity's information systems will communicate with the vendor's information systems, querying for that document or information, and the vendor's information systems will respond with that document or information. The information systems of the various vendors will, however, almost certainly be different. Consequently, the various information systems may require the queries in different formats or under different protocols, and the various information systems may provide the responsive document or information in different formats or under different protocols.
In another example, a vendor may seek to place an order for various parts or supplies from a supplier. To that end, the vendor's information systems will communicate with the supplier's information systems, seeking price and availability information of those parts or supplies. The supplier's information systems will respond with that information. Assuming price and availability are acceptable, the vendor's systems will then place the order, thus adding information to the supplier's systems. Another vendor may, either subsequently or contemporaneously, be engaged in the same set of transactions and communications with the supplier systems. The information systems of each of these vendors will almost certainly be different, providing information or requests in different formats and under different protocols.
The development process of B2B integrations, such as the exemplary integrations set forth above, is a complex process requiring multiple environments, including testing environments. The development process is designed to allow the eventual progress of the integration from development level to production-level.
The development process typically requires either (a) exposure of the environment servers to the internet and opening them up to many different connections and protocols or (b) the substitution of “canned,” or predetermined communications, with the vendor systems. The first of these alternatives involves setting up accounts and connections with multiple third parties. This alternative incurs time and expense and creates the risk of exposing those environments to the internet. The second is ineffective because it does not adequately validate a production-level system integration in a realistic manner.
It is desirable, therefore, to provide a method or system for minimizing the costs and exposure risk while adequately validating a production-level system integration.